A specialist laser-scans an F-16C Fighting Falcon at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, to create 3D aircraft models for virtual reality training.
U.S. Air Force photo
The U.S. Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command (AETC) is developing competency-based virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) training for aircraft maintenance.
Virtual training hangars are being built for the classroom and flightline with 3D environments for every airframe in AETC inventory, with AR capabilities and comprehensive instructor tools.
“This effort is tied to our priority to transform the way airmen learn through the aggressive and cost-effective modernization of education and training,” says Masoud Rasti, AETCs chief of force development strategy and technical adviser.
The virtual hangar and flightline, with most common aerospace ground equipment, are aircraft agnostic. The first virtual models of the C-5M Galaxy and C-130J Super Hercules were created for students in the Career Enlisted Aviator Center of Excellence at Joint Base San Antonio- Lackland, Texas, where 2,600 students graduate annually.
The Air Force hopes to share the virtual hangars and aircraft platform environments with other commands, including, Air Mobility, Air Combat, Air Force Reserve, and Air Force Special Operations.
Aero Precision acquires Kellstrom Defense
California Bay Area military aviation aftermarket distributor Aero Precision has acquired Kellstrom Defense, an aftermarket sustainment solutions provider headquartered near Los Angeles.
“Through this acquisition, Aero Precision creates one of the largest privately owned military aftermarket distribution businesses in the industry including repair and overhaul, manufacturing, engineering services, and logistics management,” says Aero Precision President and CEO Darryl Mayhorn.
Aero Precision and Kellstrom Defense serve military aircraft platforms such as the C-130, UH-60, F-15, F-16, and F-18. The combination gives access to the E-8/JSTARS, E-3, F-5, and P-3 legacy aircraft.
Aero Precision has stocking distribution agreements with Honeywell, Collins Aerospace (UTAS-Hamilton Sundstrand), CEF Industries, Parker, Eaton, Champion Aerospace, Crane Aerospace, Marvin Test Solutions, Essex Industries, and WesTest Engineering, supporting more than 60 countries.
Aero Precision Industries is owned by a fund managed by Odyssey Investment Partners.
GenNx360 continues acquisitions
Private equity firm GenNx360 Capital Partners has acquired a majority interest in AeroRepair Corp. headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. AeroRepair provides wheel and brake maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) and other services to the commercial, corporate, and general aviation industry.
Its sister company, Hemico, provides parts manufacturer approval (PMA) engineering services and designated engineering representative (DER) approved repairs through locations in Manchester, New Hampshire; Atlanta, Georgia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Phoenix, Arizona; Montreal, Quebec; and Calgary, Alberta.
AeroRepair has a workforce of about 200 employees. Current management will continue to operate the business under CEO Daniel Bell.
WAC specializes in the rewind and repair of rotary and static electrical (air and oil-cooled) generators and motor sub-components. Buying WAC broadens PAG’s suite of services following the recent acquisition of Momentum, a global FAA certified Part 145 repair station specializing in aviation cockpit flat panel displays.
PAG President and CEO David Mast says, “With PAG’s existing location in Vancouver, the addition of WAC’s location in Toronto expands our footprint in Canada and enhances our support to our customer base in the region.”
“WAC brings more than 60 skilled technicians to our team and we are committed to working alongside them to help grow the business further,” says Daphne Dufresne, the GenNx360 Managing Partner who led the transaction.
Arconic splits businesses, forms Howmet Aerospace
Departments - Checking In
AE Industrial Partners acquires two aerospace companies.
A little more than three years after separating from Alcoa Inc., engineered metal products company Arconic Inc. is splitting again. On April 1, 2020, the company’s Engineered Products and Forgings business (jet engine components, aircraft fastening systems, engineered structures, and forged wheels) become Howmet Aerospace Inc. The Global Rolled Products business (sheet, plate, rolled aluminum, extrusions, and building/construction systems) will be spun off as Arconic Corp.
John C. Plant, Arconic Inc.’s CEO since February 2019, and Tolga Oal will lead Howmet Aerospace as co-CEOs. Plant and Oal previously held positions at TRW Automotive; Plant for 12 years as CEO and Oal with finance and operations.
Timothy D. Myers, Arconic Inc.’s Global Rolled Products executive vice president and group president will become Arconic Corp. CEO. Myers has nearly 30 years’ experience with Arconic Inc. and its predecessors.
Howmet Aerospace takes its name from Howmet Castings, a company Alcoa bought in 2000. It will retain aerospace airfoils and ring production facilities in Whitehall, Michigan; Morristown, New Jersey; and Rancho Cucamonga, California. Howmet Aerospace will continue as sole-source of titanium and aluminum bulkheads for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Arconic Corp. will keep the Davenport, Iowa, production assets: a 4,200-ton thick-plate stretcher for aluminum and aluminum-lithium plate, horizontal heat-treat furnace, and aluminum-lithium cast house. It also retains the aluminum sheet, cast plate, extrusions, forgings, and large horizontal press capabilities at Samara, Russia.
The leading provider of aerospace sheet, Arconic produces all of Boeing’s aluminum wing and fuselage skins. It also is sole supplier to Airbus for some wing, fuselage, and structural components and provides aluminum sheet and plate for every Airbus airplane.
AE Industrial Partners acquires two aerospace companies
Established in 1957 and based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, AMA designs, manufactures, tests, and integrates spacecraft components and small satellites. Key products include sun sensors, star trackers, and star cameras featured on missions to Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. It had been owned by Artemis Capital Partners’ company Adcole Corp.
G.S. Precision Inc. manufactures complex, high-precision components and specialty hardware for aerospace engines and defense systems.
Based in Brattleboro, Vermont, G.S. Precision has five locations and more than 700 employees across the U.S. and Mexico. Founded in 1958 by George Schneeberger, a machine tool sales engineer from Switzerland, G.S. Precision will continue to be run by CEO Norm Schneeberger, son of its founder.
The two acquisitions are the eighth and ninth aerospace investments Boca Raton, Florida-based AEI has closed in the last year.
Metal 3D printer for aircraft components
Departments - 3D/Additive Manufacturing
Sumitomo Corp. of Americas invests in Elementum 3D; Glass-fiber reinforced SLS material; 3D printing services.
Velo3D and Honeywell Aerospace are partnering to qualify Velo3D’s Sapphire system for 3D printing aircraft components. The system can build highly complex geometries without support structures, improving quality and saving time and costs.
Qualification with Inconel is underway for the Velo3D Saphire system in Honeywell Aerospace’s Phoenix facility. Velo3D will provide expertise in developing parameter sets for optimal material properties. Qualification is anticipated to be complete by Q3 2020.
“We are qualifying Velo3D’s Sapphire system with the aim of printing geometries that can’t be fabricated on existing 3D metal printers. Their technology will help Honeywell develop new production-part applications while also meeting our material requirements for qualification,” says Dr. Söeren Wiener, senior director of technology and advanced operations for Honeywell Aerospace. “We intend to qualify this equipment through repeatability testing in our production environment, including build and post-processing, to generate an acceptable set of material property data and qualification of flight hardware.”
Sumitomo Corp. of Americas invests in Elementum 3D
Sumitomo Corp. of Americas (SCOA) is investing in additive manufacturing (AM) research and development company Elementum 3D Inc., which specializes in advanced metals, composites, and ceramics. Elementum holds a patent for a metal powder blended with ceramics that offers faster printing speed, stronger mechanical properties, and a wider use of metal grades.
“This investment is an excellent complement to our growing portfolio in the additive manufacturing space,” says Kazuaki Tsuda, SCOA’s senior vice president and general manager, steel and non-ferrous metal group. “Elementum is pioneering new intelligence related to the raw materials supply chain in additive manufacturing, and we see abundant opportunity for these applications in the near future.”
Elementum’s products have the potential for use across SCOA’s businesses, including steel, mineral resources, aerospace, and tubular.
Glass-fiber reinforced SLS material
Windform FR2 is a flame-retardant, glass-fiber reinforced material for selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printing. The halogen-free polyamide-based material combines wear and temperature resistance.
It’s not electrically conductive and allows for good detail resolution with smoother surface finish than Windform FR1.
Windform FR2 passed FAR 25.853 12-second vertical and 15-second horizontal flammability tests as well as 45° angle Bunsen burner and smoke density tests.
3D printing services
BigRep’s 3D PartLab at its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, will offer 3D printing services to customers.
Frank Marangell, BigRep CBO and BigRep America President says, “PartLab will support our partners and customers who are over capacity and assist other companies in need of large-format parts.”
Customized ordering services for 3D-printed parts include prototypes, tooling, molds, and end-use parts.
The Boston facility’s showroom features BigRep’s large-format AM systems including STUDIO G2, ONE, and PRO. The North American headquarters is also available for demos and consultancy.
Record-setting 1MW ring motor
Departments - 1 Last Look
Electric motor demonstrator sets two world records in two hours.
1MW ring motor produces torque and power without using permanent magnets.
Electric motors powerful enough to propel aircraft the size of a Boeing 737 as part of a hybrid propulsion system could revolutionize aviation fuel economy. NASA recently awarded grants to a group making motors 5x lighter and more efficient than any in production.
Dr. Codrin-Gruie (CG) Cantemir, a research scientist at The Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research, was awarded the grant for his 10MW Ring Motor concept that includes a tuned coil and variable-cross-section windings married to technology that achieves direct contact between coils and coolant. This enables stator magnetic field production at high frequencies while minimizing specific high frequency losses in solid conductors. The motor is an induction machine in reverse (an out-runner) where the field generated by the internal stator induces currents in a squirrel cage located in the rotor. This interaction produces torque and power without needing permanent magnets (PMs). NASA encouraged Cantemir to explore using induction motors rather than PM systems because they are safer and more robust.
In a preliminary test of a validation 1MW induction motor, Ohio State, in partnership with NASA, set two world records: one for absolute normalized continuous power density and the other for continuous power density for an induction motor.
The previous record for normalized continuous power density was set by Siemens of Germany at approximately 2.05W/kg*rpm and used rare-Earth neodymium magnets and expensive cobalt-based magnetic material. The 2.60W/kg*rpm record uses only off-the-shelf magnetic materials without PMs.
One unexpected reason for the record is the use of aluminum rather than copper as the conductor in the stator coils. Theoretical work conducted with the grant showed researchers that in certain situations, aluminum will behave better than copper.
“It may be counterintuitive, but a power-dense motor uses less material and less tooling versus conventional, hence the cost saving,” Cantemir says.
A 2.7MW motor is being developed to further validate the concept’s performance.
The Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research https://car.osu.edu
Growing the space economy
Features - Cover Story
NASA’s efforts to commercialize space exploration are encouraging businesses to invest in new technologies and capabilities.
Taken by crew members aboard the International Space Station, capture and docking of the SpaceX Dragon.
Photos courtesy of NASA
The Apollo program remains one of the great technological accomplishments of humankind, but it didn’t accelerate space commerce the way its visionary leaders intended. We haven’t been back to the moon since 1972. We don’t have a human settlement on Mars. We don’t have an American spacecraft to take our astronauts to and from space. One could be disappointed, but things are changing rapidly.
Energizing many are the thrilling successes of SpaceX and other privately funded ventures, and private markets are now paying attention to lower-cost missions enabled by small satellites. This is shining a light on current space capabilities and NASA is taking advantage of this newfound attention.
Accelerating space commerce
Half a century after Apollo, NASA is taking a different approach to accelerate space commerce, exploration, and discovery. Rather than traditional cost-plus contracts, NASA is acting more like a customer buying a service. By using its existing Other Transaction Authority – typically Space Act Agreements or other Public-Private Partnerships – NASA is providing seed funding and asking industry to invest in an off-world future. With industry sharing risk, we expect to have commercial sources for every leg of the transportation network from Earth to the moon by the late 2020s.
This fundamental shift could unleash a wave of new commercial capabilities, from in-space housing to taxis ferrying people and cargo to and from the moon and Mars. Manufacturers would be incentivized to move boldly if they know NASA and other government customers will buy the services they enable.
Tested approach
Government has done this in the past. The Air Mail Act of 1925 allowed the Postmaster General to contract with private companies to deliver mail. Companies that received the 12 contracts are credited with ultimately creating the modern airline industry. To establish an off-world future, we want multiple suppliers for each leg of the transportation network so there’s assured access and competition to drive costs down. We are headed in that direction.
Starting in 2006, NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), and its follow-on Commercial Resupply Services (CRS and CRS2) contracts, developed the cargo delivery services that support the International Space Station (ISS). COTS funded the development of the SpaceX Dragon and Northrop Grumman Cygnus systems. CRS and CRS2 were awarded in 2008 and 2015 for delivery services, adding Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser as a third service supplier. Compared to NASA’s traditional procurement approach, these contracts gave industry broad leeway in how to design systems, only controlling those parts that interacted with the ISS. To date, 29 cargo delivery flights to the ISS have been made under this program.
The Commercial Crew program is poised to deliver astronauts to space in 2020 on U.S.-made spacecraft for the first time since 2011. Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Dragon are being prepared for their first missions. While developed under a more traditional procurement framework, the result is still a commercial product, giving government astronauts and private citizens the choice of flying on two different vehicles to and from space.
Building infrastructure
We have long envisioned a future where more people are living and working in space. They will conduct scientific research, manufacture goods for use in space or back on Earth, and occupy new platforms for adventure tourism. This time, we are going to the moon to stay, so we will need a range of support services, both human and robotic, and new infrastructure to support long-term settlement.
Artemis program:
NASA is managing and soliciting a broad network of partners for transportation services from the Earth to the moon. Several different procurements are active, with each using a slightly modified version of the approach used to procure ISS cargo delivery services.
Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program: Valued at $2.6 billion throughout 10 years, CLPS will deliver small- and medium-sized payloads to the lunar surface. Nine companies were announced in November 2018, with five companies added a year later. These 14 companies offer a catalog of options, with each able to bid on NASA-issued task orders. CLPS is moving fast, with lunar landing task orders already awarded to Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines. These missions will carry small payloads to the lunar surface in 2021. NASA intends to fly up to two CLPS missions per year.
Lunar Gateway: Currently in development, this small, human-tended space station will orbit the moon. The Orion spacecraft, launched on the Space Launch System (SLS), will bring astronauts to Gateway, the staging point for robotic and crewed exploration of the lunar surface. A future version of Gateway is envisioned as the staging point for NASA’s Deep Space Transport concept to travel to Mars. The Lunar Gateway will include the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) developed by Maxar, and the Habitat and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module developed by Northrop Grumman. Contracts for these two elements were awarded in 2019.
Gateway Logistics vehicles: A new fleet will deliver payloads and other cargo to support missions to the lunar surface. Proposals were delivered in October 2019, and NASA is expected to award up to $7 billion in contracts, funding development and services throughout 15 years. These vehicles will deliver at least 3,400kg of pressurized cargo and 1,000kg of unpressurized cargo to the Gateway on each mission.
Human Landing System (HLS): A key element of Artemis will be transporting astronauts from the Gateway to the lunar surface. NASA plans to award contracts to two different teams to participate in the first phase of this multiyear effort. If this multiple-source approach continues through development, these landers will be available to support government and commercial missions to the moon in the mid-to-late 2020s.
NASA is working with partners to design and develop a small spaceship called the Gateway that will orbit the moon.
Beyond the moon
Separately from Artemis, NASA is preparing to invest in the low Earth orbit (LEO) commercial ecosystem to develop commercial modules and free flyers. Combined with existing commercial launch companies such as SpaceX, ULA, Northrop Grumman, and RocketLab, there is growth potential in LEO space development.
Finally, we will need infrastructure in space to support our off-world future. The development of power; communications; positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT); habitation and manufacturing platforms; and civil infrastructure – roads and launch/landing pads – is essential. The leadership and foresight that led to the Transcontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) will be needed to spur future commercial development in space.
These examples are incredibly capital intensive, so how does the current industrial base adjust and grow to support future growth in space?
After years of consolidation, the space industry is seeking new suppliers with commercial operations experience. NASA’s investments could create market surety, encouraging businesses to invest in new space technologies and applications. Solving the challenges of living and working in space – protecting humans from radiation, protecting components from lunar dust – requires the ingenuity of many.
Planetary exploration requires broader capabilities and knowledge than what’s available today. We’ll need expertise in telecommunications, agriculture, mining, and construction to build an off-world future. But these markets will take time to develop, so how will we encourage these non-endemic industries to come and invest for the longer term required in the space industry?
Great economic benefit comes from exploration. It has been governments’ responsibility to invest in the infrastructure needed to move the economy forward. NASA’s investments in transportation are laying the groundwork for a much larger space economy. This foundation, combined with the commercial launch services available and in development, has the potential to change how we live on Earth.
